A Design of Experiments Approach to Optimizing RFID Deployment for Management of Sustainable Material Flow in Cyber–Physical Production Systems

The transition to Cyber–Physical Production Systems (CPPS) requires reliable real-time identification of material flows, yet RFID performance in metal-rich industrial environments remains sensitive to hardware configuration and tag orientation. This study aims to support RFID-based material-flow management in automotive inbound logistics by identifying a suitable UHF RFID configuration for cable harness containers. A structured experimental configuration-screening procedure based on Design of Experiments (DoE) principles was applied to evaluate three controllable factors: antenna type, RFID transponder type, and transponder orientation. The number of cable harnesses in the container was treated as an uncontrollable factor reflecting operational variability. The experiment included 1500 screening measurements, followed by 4000 validation measurements for the two best-performing transponder configurations. The results indicated that a linearly polarized antenna, outward transponder orientation, and the AD 232 UHF transponder provided the most reliable configuration among the tested alternatives. In the validation sample, this configuration produced no missed reads across 40,000 reading opportunities, corresponding to an observed sample DPMO of zero and a 6+ σ indication. The findings show that systematic RFID configuration can improve material-flow data reliability and support leaner, more transparent CPPS operations, while long-term reliability should be confirmed through extended industrial monitoring.